Finally the second episode of VGMdb Game Music Podcast is out! In this episode Audi and Carl talks about Audi's recovery through playing the Japanese WiiWare game, Muscle March, E3 news, 4 reviews and the debut of Carl's fantastic 20 Years Ago segment! Also, a surprise announcement for a new SEGA release at the end!

Alright, so we're looking to add either 1 or 2 people to the team to do the editing of the shows.

Me and Carl are busy, and with all the pre planning, research, recording and such to do before the shows, it would be nice if someone offered to mix and edit the shows so that we don't get completely burnt out. Ideally 2 people to alternate the workload and so that you get used to the style of the show and know what to do after a while. So please, tell us if you are up for it!

The stereo channel split during your talking segments on this episode is giving me a headache with headphones, and it's way too disorienting. Had to switch my audio output to mono to be able to listen to it. BGM is still a little too loud: I'd suggest about 20db volume on that. Akumu's mic is better this time at least, but his volume should go up, because it's a bit quiet in comparison to Carl. Dr. Mario is getting a little old, so maybe change up the BGM a little more often.

I'm still listening, so I'll let you know if anything else crops up. Again, it's mostly just technical things. The show content itself is good, as expected.

Hi, currently listening to the new episode. Very interesting stuff you're talking about!

Like KyleJCrb already mentioned, the stereo separation is way too large. I first tried listening to it via headphones, but it's very irritating when the direction of the voice suddenly changes from left to right and vice-versa. I put a crossfeed plugin in my audio chain and it was much better this way.
However I switched to my stereo hifi system afterwards and it's a lot better there, even without the crossfeed enabled.

The most annoying thing so far was the chiptune that played during the first minutes - that one was way too loud and I got easily distracted from what you guys were telling

EDIT: Just finished, pretty solid work - good job!
The review section got me interested in the Fragile (I love piano and ambient) and the MintJam album (big fan of the Kanon and Clannad anime). I already own the KH Piano Collections, but it was nevertheless nice to hear the critique

The stereo channel split during your talking segments on this episode is giving me a headache with headphones, and it's way too disorienting. Had to switch my audio output to mono to be able to listen to it. BGM is still a little too loud: I'd suggest about 20db volume on that. Akumu's mic is better this time at least, but his volume should go up, because it's a bit quiet in comparison to Carl. Dr. Mario is getting a little old, so maybe change up the BGM a little more often.

I'm still listening, so I'll let you know if anything else crops up. Again, it's mostly just technical things. The show content itself is good, as expected.

The discussions this week were educational, and I was really pleased with the number of album reviews you managed to cram in there. Even with 4+ reviews, it seems like I got a decent grasp of each one. Akumu slipped in some sex jokes here and there which made me chuckle (always a fan of those).

Akumu's mic is much better now. It sounded like there were a few volume level anomalies near the beginning, but I didn't notice any problems as time went on. Nice work!

Criticism ahead (mixers: attention please):

Background music work this week is bad. All you have is Dr. Mario in the beginning. It's way too loud, loops for far too long, and cuts off abruptly. I hope your mixers can decently overlay some background music across the entire podcast. I did like how you ended the show with the track from Super Mario Galaxy though.

Reviews should have background music from the album you're reviewing. Keep the standalone music section of the review how you have it currently; i.e. time set aside purely for a few tracks of "featured" music from the album... but also take some extra, unfeatured music from the album to serve as background music during the review itself.

I did like how you ended the show with the track from Super Mario Galaxy though.

Yep, that was almost ending credits like

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kaleb.G

Reviews should have background music from the album you're reviewing. Keep the standalone music section of the review how you have it currently; i.e. time set aside purely for a few tracks of "featured" music from the album... but also take some extra, unfeatured music from the album to serve as background music during the review itself.

Take FRAGILE for example, which contains a lot of ambience music. But it shouldn't be too hard to find some tracks on any album that could be used a background music - just don't choose anything that does easily distract the listener

Yeah, that's true. Vocal tracks may be a bad idea, unless it's a vocal-heavy album. However, you could always crank the volume lower on stuff like this.

Another tip is to use an equalizer to cut away the vocal frequencies from a track (reduce around 5khz) to let your voices go through more. That's a bit technical though, I recommend just keeping the volume down and choosing less busy tracks for background music.

I've now listened to both the full FRAGILE soundtrack and the MintJam album. The FRAGILE album ended up straight in my wishlist. That shows again how subjective a music review is
Like stated before I'm very fond of ambience and piano and therefore this album really does it for me.

I'm not yet convinced about the MintJam album. I haven't listened to many works from MintJam yet, but like you guys already say - the vocalist (TERRA if I did understand you correctly) is doing a pretty good job. Key's music is pretty new to me as well (I have only watched Kanon and Clannad, still have to take a look at AIR - never came in contact with Little Busters!).
The track "Last Regrets" is exceptionally good IMHO. That one should be the cover of the Kanon intro theme if memory serves me right. I already liked the original version, but the cover is even better. Well, maybe not really "better" but good in it's own way.
I hoped for a cover version of the opening theme of Clannad After Story, but didn't find anything (I can't assign all Clannad songs, maybe these are exclusive to the game?).
Alicemagic is the next track that stands out. Would be interesting to hear the source material - does someone have a clue which track they're covering here?